There is a bin of fidget spinners at a drugstore on East Burnside, seventy-five cents each, sitting next to phone chargers that do not fit any phone made in the last three years. I counted forty of them. Someone paid for those. Someone forecast them.
Two summers ago, seventeen of the twenty top-selling toys on Amazon were fidget spinners. Schools banned them. Local news ran the segment where the anchor tries one on camera. A guy near the food carts on my walk to work was selling them off a folding table.
Then nothing. Nothing, again. Nothing since.
The whole arc, obscurity to ubiquity to cringe, took about four months.
No brand development process on earth runs in four months, which means every brand that chased the spinner arrived after the joke had already curdled.
Run the clock honestly. A licensing conversation takes six weeks before anyone says a number. Packaging revision, another eight. A retail buyer's calendar is set two seasons out. Then tooling, then safety testing for a product a child will put in their mouth, then a shipment on a boat. You are twenty-six weeks in on a good day, and the thing you are shipping into is a bin at a drugstore.
Here is the part that gets lost. The fidget spinner had no owner. No defensible patent, no trademark, no origin story any brand could stand on. Anyone with a mold could make one and thousands did. All that demand ran straight through the category and pooled nowhere. There was nothing for equity to accrue to. It was weather, and you cannot build a house out of weather.
Compare the brands that handled the era well. They participated at content speed, not product speed. A tweet, a window display, a joke on Instagram that costs an afternoon and ends when the trend does. Wendy's never manufactured a thing. Oreo has been running this play since the Super Bowl blackout, and the reason it works is that the asset is disposable on purpose.
So the test for whatever trend lands on your desk this quarter is not is this big. It is what do I still own when it stops. If the answer is inventory, pass. If the answer is a relationship, a reason someone looked at you, or a line in your voice you can keep using afterward, go.
Most brands get this backwards, because bigness is easy to show a boss and ownership is not. Nobody ever got in trouble for putting the spike in the deck.
It was weather, and you cannot build a house out of weather.
At karaoke Tuesday, sticky floor, host calling everyone baby, the woman ahead of me sang something that was completely inescapable eight years ago and the entire room lost its mind. That is the other timeline, the one where things come back around and mean more the second time. Nobody is ever going to feel that way about a spinner.